DEBATE: Why Do Gen Z Women Hate Men So Much? - #1094

32:35So it's just, it's risky. There's a relationship between infidelity and extroversion, right? Yeah. And I kind of wonder if that might play a role into like why women show some of these traits. It's like there was an incentive from men to not be super extroverted, high confidence, because if that's a cue of sexual promiscuity. You want to signal dad, not Chad. Well, no, for women. If women are too extroverted, other men might infer she will cheat. And if men have the concern over paternity certainty and cuckoldry, then they might have preferred women who are slightly more insecure, more humble.

33:13Right. And so women might have encountered mate preferences that selected them to be slightly more insecure. It's less threatening from a mating perspective. it is interesting though because i feel like at the moment my generation of young women are on average very insecure about how they look and they're very anxious but they also seem to be louder than ever in terms of i'm empowered i'm strong i'm independent and so you have women who are really trying to portray that they never get jealous and they never get insecure but then they seem to have this deep risk aversion and anxiety and i don't know where that comes from There are some studies where women who are really agentic and assertive, if they're negotiating, they experience backlash where people don't like them, but not if they're negotiating on behalf of someone else.

34:01So I kind of wonder if it's like the only way women are allowed to be like tough and agentic is to be an advocate for some moral cause for someone more vulnerable. It's like the only way you're allowed to be because it seems like that's the domain where you see women all of a sudden be very hostile when you don't get that hostility in any other context. And so maybe that's the one domain where people allow it. This episode is brought to you by Whoop. According to my Whoop, I've tracked nearly 2 ,000 days of my life. And the thing that still gets me is that I could have predicted almost every bad day before it happens.

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35:41Because I would think. I'm surprised by how well women have acclimatized to the sort of modern career, fast-paced capitalist society thing. I think they're really, not only are they outperforming, I think they're outperforming what my expectations would have been of that. I don't know whether that makes sense, but given what you know about women's disposition, predisposition, selection pressures, is it surprising that they're doing as well as they are? I don't know. I think in a lot of ways, like the modern world is more conducive to women's traits than men's. We're not allowed to be aggressive.

36:15The only way that you can be aggressive is very subtly, which women are experts at.

36:22Now in a workforce, we probably are rewarded for being the egalitarian boss or the one who checks in with their employees. Over time, as we move to a prestige-based competition system, that's more conducive to a lot of women's traits than a dominance-based competition system. But I see your point that at the same time, you also have to be agentic and assertive in the workforce. So it'd be really interesting to see how women navigate that in practice. But there are some data showing that more agentic women are particularly disliked by their female colleagues. And so I think that might lead to women's using these egalitarian strategies as a way of like simultaneously being competitive and assertive while looking kind along the way.

37:04And I think you could say for good reason, the modern world or workplace is kind of designed to neuter men's most aggressive tendencies. You can't exactly get into a physical fight to settle something anymore in the workplace. It's just not acceptable. But you can spread gossip, and that is kind of rewarded. So in that style of aggression, women will far succeed. Have you ever done any bless-his-heart stuff? Men do gossip too, right? It's not like just a female thing. Yeah, so we manipulated whether a man said it about another man or a woman said it about another man. You're going to have to just give a 30 ,000 foot view of the bless her heart effect.

37:42Okay. Basically, if women phrase their negative gossip with concern, people didn't register it as gossip. They were more likely to believe that she was a good person. And so it seems like you get these benefits by believing you're concerned about your gossip target or maybe doing it consciously. And then there was a different study where we did look at men and women, where we looked at women's use of like complaining, venting about their friends, like complaining about how their friends treated them. Like, oh, you know, Susie always says these weird comments to me and they hurt my feelings. If men did that, other people didn't care as much.

38:18So it just doesn't work. I think it's whiny. Yeah, it is. It is. It's non-agentic in a way, right? Yeah, they don't have the same sympathy. In terms of bless his heart, maybe it would work for men because you're just seeming compassionate. I don't know. If we did, it would be interesting to test. There's a substack called Men Are Good. Have you come across this? Sounds controversial. It's really well written. I mean, look, it gets a bit men's rights-y, but some of the insights are fucking money. Like really, really good. Tom Golden, I think he's called. That name rings a bell. Really good substack.

38:55Anyway, he had this one bit where he talked about how men are told that they should open up more about their emotions, but every single incentive pretty much pushes against it, including that of other men, that men don't like to see men who are opening up about their emotions as a kind of ick and an aversion. You look like an unreliable ally. You're not maybe thinking this consciously, but two things are true that men are trying to do at the moment. It's like men's mental health is a really big issue, but okay, if you see a guy that's crying on social media, will you give him sympathy or will you laugh at him?

39:31Almost every guy is going to go, simp, cuck, soy boy, you're an idiot. This is lame. You need to man up. It's like, okay, so which is it? And we spent two hours talking about some of the paradoxes of sort of modern female culture and capitalism versus independence and freedom versus motherhood and just a moment, all this stuff. But I think it's important to call out the ones where, guys, you do not get to say, men need to open up more men we need to have more services for mental health let's say that men don't believe that because a lot of men might say men don't need to open up more they need to man up more and you go okay do you think that suicide prevention is something that's important okay how do you respond when you see a guy that's incredibly depressed on social media and really struggling because what is it 95 percent of men that took their own lives had sought mental health advice from the exact services that they're supposed to in advance presumably if you're remotely online and young, you've maybe tweeted or posted something that's a bit sad at some point.

40:27Have you checked in on your bro? Like if you were at dinner and one of your friends started crying, how comfortable would you be at sitting in that? Especially if you're British. It's just not, it's not a conducive environment. So men want room for their struggles to be acknowledged. But when other men are struggling, they don't acknowledge their struggles. Does that make sense? This is where I think the insight from our ancestral history and the selection pressure as men and women faced is so informative. William, you'd fucking put a billboard above your head that says evolutionary psychology is real.

41:00It's coming. Right. Okay. But no, the specific pressure. So men have this deep ancestral history of coalitional value to each other. So to express vulnerability is a massive liability and risk to you and to your allies. So the message that I think struggling men that would be more effective than, oh, you can come cry on my shoulder is we need you actually and you're valuable you're useful and we need you to be stronger so whatever you need to do to get back on your feet and i know you can do it you just got to rally that that we've all kind of been there that i feel will resonate much more compelling you know what's a good example of that um new york divorce lawyer uh was on the show a couple of couple of months ago yeah james sexton and he was he was saying to me he told me this story about he was in a relationship with two different women, one after the other.

41:52Okay. I was like, okay. As a divorce lawyer, that would be a high-risk strategy. Yeah. It would have been safe. So both women didn't like the fact that on a weekend, he doesn't shave. He has to shave every single day before he goes into court because he doesn't want to look stubbly. And then on Thursday night, he would shave and he wouldn't shave again, maybe until a Monday morning. So by the time it gets to a Sunday, he was real scratchy. And the first relationship he was in, the woman said, it irritates me so much. It makes my face red. It makes me break out in spots. And I really don't like it.

42:27And I wish that you'd shave. It doesn't make me feel very good. That relationship didn't work. Next woman had the exact same preference. But instead, she said, you know what? It is so sexy when you're clean shaven. I think that it's just the hottest thing in the world. Immediate. I'm doing it right now. I love to have my hair buzz cut short, the fade for about 15 years. I'm doing the bro flow now because my missus is insistent upon it. But she hasn't said, I hate you with short hair. She said you're hotter with... Not twice. She said that you're hotter with long hair? Yeah, she prefers the long hair.

42:59But she prefers the long hair as opposed to doesn't like the short hair. You know what I mean? Oh, okay. Do we need to do an intervention? She's quite a domineering woman. Yeah, yeah. I've met her. She wears a lot of leather. Yeah, but I like that about I think men do respond to encouragement and I love that about male friendships like if you ever see men in the gym they'll be honestly giving each other feedback on how to improve whereas women will be like not commenting on each other's form and just chit chatting about their lives and so it seems like men really want each other to be better because if that's your like brother in arms you need him to be the best soldier he can be and so it's so funny because if you listen to like male directed podcasts they're always like how to maximize productivity and you know and then female directed podcasts are like the exact opposite they're like you're a queen no matter what you do if he doesn't recognize it leave him and so then it makes me wonder like if we're receiving this feedback from our same-sex peers what is that going to do to men and women over time men are going to go into looks maxing finance maxing and then women will just go into like wallowing like it yeah i feel like women don't wouldn't call each other out either so if like a young woman posted on social media that she had this horrible experience with a man and it was kind of unfair toward the man the comments are all going to be in support of her because if she's say crying or she's upset on camera we're all going to co-ruminate together and then also confirm her maybe neurotic assumptions of what's happened whereas i feel like with men as you said it doesn't engender the same empathy and so maybe they would have a load of comments men prefer the tough love so there's this new trend i've got where i retweet kind of these random masculinity behaviors as tonic masculinity and one is this guy he was morbidly obese and he was gonna die like he was really that that severe and his friend text him every day you fat fucking pain and the guy loves this friend he's like he saved my life he's literally like just doing that Checking in with me every day.

45:04Checking in with me. Well, it worked. Like he said, if he cares enough about me, he needs me to be better. Yeah, yeah. Like that was it. Whereas women would be like, you look better than ever. It's queen. What does it engender for women as you look at sort of the next generation? The best thing about this, you know Critical Drinker? He had this fucking awesome take. So he compares the first Mulan movie, which was the Disney animated one, to the live action one that came out maybe five, six, seven years ago. And in the first one, the protagonist is smaller and weaker than all of the men. And she needs to disguise herself.

45:41And she has to use feminine guile and agility and speed. And she has to work even harder. And eventually, after doing that, she's able to become the hero. and it's kind of a female story of self-empowerment through determination and agency and working hard and stuff like that. Roll the clock forward by two decades. The protagonist is immediately better than all of the men. She doesn't need to work at it. The only restriction that she encounters is the fact that the world doesn't believe in her enough. She's a Mary Sue. She's got some like, what's that? A Mary Sue, a character who's just already perfect.

46:16Okay, yeah, that's like Wonder Woman. one no not one the skywalker film no what's the one in avengers that can like fix everything wonder woman no not wonder woman uh miss marvel or yes captain captain captain marvel is like she's like off saving other shit in the universe you're like hey hey hey thanos just killed 50 of everyone it's like no there's other problems elsewhere and she's like the most powerful of all the superheroes anyway second mulan movie she's got this magical estrogen chi whatever it is she's like some super feminine thing that she's able to just use and she's immediately better.

46:49And you go, well, when I think about if I have a daughter, which I hope to, what role model do I want her to have? Do I want her to believe the worldview that the only time that you encounter obstacles is because of something systemic that's out of your control because the world doesn't believe in you? Or do I want her to believe that you can overcome stuff just the same way that the men can? and that if you do encounter obstacles, that's par for the course. There's no entitlement. This isn't something that's wrong. The world is filled with problems. You just need to work out a way to solve them and you can.

47:26Not that they're a bug, but they're a feature. And it's also quite sexist because they lionize the male default. So if a woman shows male typical behaviors, that's how she shows she's kick ass. If she shows feminine guile, like you said, that's not quite the same. They don't want to promote those gender typical behaviors. I came up with a name for it. The Soft Bigotry of Male Expectations. And you remember when there was that hunter-gatherer paper that came out? Perfect example of it. Can you explain what that was when it was reanalyzed and then reanalyzed again? So they tried to present data to show that, oh, the man, the hunter is basically a myth and that loads of cultures have women as the hunters in the society.

48:02But they were really coding their data where any society that a woman did any hunting at all. A rabbit, one rabbit killed, that is coded as woman was hunting as well, even if men were by and large responsible for... 364 days of the year they were doing it. Yeah. And what's really annoying is there's actually a really cool story, if you look at our hunter-gatherer past, is that women contributed as many, if not more, calories to the society through their gathering. And that's cool, but it's sex-specific. But it's just as good. You don't have to be just the same as the men to be as good or good in a different way it's like it's it's actually really sexist if they think you have to be like it's a kind of it's a fucking massive amount of bigotry that devalues what would have been whatever female coded behavior and this is the line from andrew schultz where his wife who used to work at google had their first kid and would then be walking around the supermarket near where her ex-co-employees and colleagues would walk around and they say, what are you doing now?

49:04And she'd say, I'm just a mom. And he said, it was the just that killed him that there's something about doing something that was inherently female coded that was seen as less valuable. You go, how is this not sexist? Is this not fucking sexist to say the thing that came to you naturally, the gathering as opposed to the hunting? Well, women can do it just as much as men and maybe sometimes even better. And you go, well, yeah, but that implicitly devalues the thing that they were doing more of. Like, it's very, I don't know, it feels like bigotry to me. Is there something going on whereby, like, feminine guile is meant to be kept mysterious and you don't want it said out loud the way you do things or something?

49:47I don't know. I just think, like, maybe it's, like, an assumption that, like, women are a block, a monolith, when in reality, women have competing interests. So, like, feminism isn't operating on behalf of all women. It's really good for hyper-agentic women. It might be penalizing the women who are more female-typical, who are more nurturing, who want these things. And so it's kind of tragic that, like, as a result of championing these women, we have to also, like, denigrate these women. And it seems like, like, if you really wanted to be pro-women, support them in whichever direction they take.

50:25For a community that's trying to be very inclusive, it's highly exclusionary. Yes. Yes. To critique some women for wanting love and babies. That's beautiful. Support all types. I also think it's because we have a somewhat therapeutic culture now where the ultimate goal for women is self-actualization. So it's becoming their authentic selves. And that's why you see these storylines in movies where the woman is basically trying to... you find her authentic self and then everyone else is a distraction and an obstacle. The men then become obstacles. And this goes back to the beginning of the conversation with marriage and women having a negative view of men and the risk aversion because they will be an obstacle to their self-actualization.

51:11And that is now the ultimate mission. There's a moment in the second Doctor Strange Marvel movie where a zombie version of Benedict Cumberbatch goes back in time to tell the female protagonist, who is a Latina daughter of a lesbian couple called America Chavez, that she just needs to believe in herself. Like that's where she's the most powerful, she was born as the most powerful person in the world. And she's got this thing, but she just didn't believe in herself enough. And that kind of goes to the podcast thing, which again, like it just to me, it feels really patronizing to tell women that you're perfect as you are.

51:53Like you are immutable and the world is mutable. You don't need to change yourself. The world should bend around you. Whereas male podcasts say the world doesn't give a single fuck about you. You need to do everything you can to try and counteract this entropy locally, bro. Before we continue, I wish someone had told me five years ago to stop overthinking nutrition and just find something that works. I've simplified mine down to one scoop a day and it's made hitting my nutritional bases an awful lot easier. AG1 includes 75 vitamins, minerals, probiotics and whole food ingredients. And that is why I've been drinking it every morning for over five years now.

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52:59If you're still on the fence, they've got a 90 day money back guarantee in the US. So you can buy it and try it for three months. And if you do not like it, they'll just give you your money back. Right now, you can get a free AG1 welcome kit that includes a bottle of D3K2, AG1 flavor sampler, and that 90-day money-back guarantee by going to the link in the description below. Or heading to drinkag1.com slash modernwisdom. That's drinkag1.com slash modernwisdom. On the topic of sexism, Freya, I'd like to put you on the spot a bit at the moment. Are you calling me a sexist? I would include you. Well, we'll see.

53:35I want to ask you a few questions. You've been described as the voice of Gen Z women. So this will be very interesting to get your opinion on these questions. So I'm going to read them up to you. So, Tanya, I already know what you think because we're working on this together. So is it closer to sexist towards men or women to believe the following things? One, women have a superior moral sensibility. Sexist toward men, I would say. Okay. Women have a quality of purity few men possess. Sex is toward men. Women have a more refined sense of culture and taste. Sex is toward men. Okay, full house, sex is towards men.

54:15Next set of questions. We're almost done. Do you think it would be a good or bad thing if men mostly agreed with the sentiment of the following statements? A good woman should be sat on a pedestal.

54:29Good. Okay. Women should be cherished and protected by men. Good. Men should sacrifice to provide for women Good In a disaster, women need to be rescued first Good Every man ought to have a woman he adores Good Men are incomplete without women Or men are incomplete without women Yeah, good Despite accomplishment, men are incomplete without women Yeah, good And people are often happy without romance Bad Okay You are a massive benevolent sexist Those are the items on the benevolent sexism scale. And I polled all my followers on this, and they, like you, believed that the statements were either sexist to men or a good thing, right?

55:18So it kind of begs this question of what is this scale measuring? So this is an idea that Tanya and I and some other colleagues are working on that we call the mismeasurement of men. Now, that title is strategic because there was a famous book called The Mismeasure of Men by Stephen Jay Gould, who was very critical of evolutionary psychology and evolutionary approaches to human behavior. And we think it's the precise opposite that's happening in scale development in psychology now, that a lack of insight into evolutionary psychology and just science in general is creating these crazy problematic scales.

55:54So you've got scales that are measuring toxic masculinity, benevolent sexism, and male sexual entitlement that are actually problematic in so many ways. But one of the ways is they're measuring awareness of facts about the world. So one of the items is women are often attracted to muscularity and dominance. And that's taken as evidence of toxic masculinity. And there's no attitude added on to that inference. It's just, do you know that that's sometimes the case? And it is sometimes the case. And these scales, they're like what I call the Kathy Newman of scales. They require an extra inference about the implication of agreeing with the statement.

56:40So you believe that women deserve to be protected. Oh, so what you're really saying is they should have their autonomy limited to keep them safe for their own good. And it's like, that's not measured. So it's a total mismeasurement of men. And it also pathologizes women's own preferences. So women have strong preferences for protection and provisioning, and men care about being seen as attractive to women. So they're going to prioritize that over being seen as sexist. So it's a huge problem we see. But yeah, sorry to tell you if you're a man. So is that the same as internalized misogyny? Same concept?

57:14Not quite the same. So benevolent sexism is one end of the scale of what's called ambivalent sexism on one end of the scale they have hostile sexism which is like direct antipathy towards women to be like oh women are trash basically like really direct and obvious whereas benevolent sexism is this more subtle putting a kind of infantilizing of women and um which i believe could be a real concept but when i looked under the hood at these items that were used to measure it i couldn't believe it i just thought that they're absurd well that reminds me of the new statesman piece because the new statesman piece basically concluded that liberal women are unhappy and then everybody was basically we spoke about this they were saying that this is no one's spoken about what's going on with liberal women this is new like the new statesman are the first to have the balls to say it but the interesting thing is is that i sort of get viewed with the internal misogyny thing because I will say the same thing, which is liberal women are unhappy, but I'll also say it's because they have these unmet needs.

58:21It's because they want to belong. And it's like a compassionate worldview that I think women want to be protected. They want to feel like they're safe and stable and all of these things. But then I get the, that's a sexist point of view, but the new statesman can present it and say, young women are unhappy and draw different conclusions. And then it's not a sexist point. I told you, your female privilege has been revoked. You don't have the female privilege that you once thought you did. Because I'm white. Because you're white, because you're right of center. Yeah. Yeah, I then don't get treated as a woman at all.

58:54No, you're an honorary man. Congratulations, it's three on one. So in the literature, there's this kind of confusion about, oh, women are perplexingly attracted to benevolent sexism, and this is like a problem. It's an inconvenient finding. But when you look at the way the items are written, it's needless. because I think women are attracted to men who believe women should be protected. But I don't think they're attracted to men who would add on the extra inference and would say, oh, because women need to be protected, they need to have their rights limited for their own good. So if you had the item written in a proper way, in the scale designed in a proper way, you would actually have no problematic attraction to benevolent sexism.

59:33Do you remember that video of the two travelers in Thailand and a guy pulls out a knife? It's CCTV footage. oh i think yeah it went super super viral and all of the replies and all of the uh quote tweets of it were girl he's trash so this guy pulls out a knife and he's trying to steal the woman's bag and she fights him off and the guy hides behind a fucking pillar the dude hides behind a pillar so there's two things that are sort of yeah icky right and we all have this sense that you should protect dude what was that fucking thing that i said i put this in the group chat six months ago and I fucking called it and I was right about the fact that women would be less, there would be more.

1:00:12Oh, here it is. Look at this. Oh no. So that guy's got a knife. Homeboy hides. Homeboy hides behind the pillar while she is fighting him. And there's another dude that just comes over and maybe he's with the guy. And then this guy with the fucking... A benevolently sexist man. Yeah, look. And thinks the woman cannot defend herself. And what a sexist son of a bitch. I know, what a pig. What an absolute pig. Is it the dude on the bike? I think it's a... He comes in with a helmet. Good one. Dude, a helmet to the head. Commute to help Yeah So almost everybody was universal in this That guy that's hiding behind the pillar Is What are you doing dude come on Yeah it's a knife and fucking scary or whatever But like do something Women's preference for protection is seriously strong So I ran a poll asking Which would have a stronger effect This was my idea Don't fucking say I would run a poll This is my idea I was even surprised by the result women said it would have a stronger effect on their attractiveness to a man if they found out he was unwilling to protect them than it would be if he cheated on her in a one night stand that is really strong I kind of wonder if maybe that's one factor in why women aren't interested in men nowadays is men don't get to display those abilities if we're not everyone's coming back from war yeah if we're not seeing men defending our groups or hunting you don't get to see the value of male formidability or the display of it But what I'm starting to wonder is like if women even realize how much stronger men are.

1:01:49When I ask my students, like I present the sex difference in upper body strength and they're surprised. And I'm like, what? There's this viral trend on TikTok apparently now where it's like asking couples to ask the guy to go into the challenge of putting her in handcuffs in 30 seconds. And they're like, it's the greatest foreplay ever. It's like women get so turned on. while realizing the strength difference is crazy. Yeah, well, I mean, that's the thing that Andrew Thomas was talking about. Does Andrew do Krav Maga or some shit? He does some kind of martial artsy thing, right? And he's saying that the ability to turn on and turn off aggression is really rare.

1:02:31Like most guys, the aggression sort of bleeds out in the same way as your level of obsession and how much you pay attention to patterns is great when you're trying to write a new piece, but is not so great when you're dealing with your intimate relationship or whatever. Guys that are aggressive are good. If homeboy comes along with a knife, forget running away. He's licking his lips. The guy's like, oh, I'm waiting my entire life. And then just pulls out an armory of things to kill him with. You're like, okay, everyone's like Tim Kennedy. But very few people have learned, very few men have learned to turn that off.

1:03:02And I think what women, what's got crossed over a little bit here is that women love the idea of a man who is able to be aggressive, but never to them. And unfortunately, the guys, I mean, how many MMA fighters have had awful domestic abuse situations that you've selected for a guy who is, he is going to really, really stand up for me? Well, yeah, but maybe that's also, that's not to say that all fucking MMA fighters are going to be home abusers, but this has happened a bunch of times. You go, it's hard to turn that aggression off. and the protector thing is great, but the just raw aggression thing carries on.

1:03:43It's a trade-off women have to make, and it's predictable, the ecologies in which they'll actually select a really formidable mate. And it's predictable based on the individual differences in that woman's size. Smaller women in those dangerous ecologies tend to have a stronger preference for a really strong, aggressive form of attack. What would a dangerous ecology in the modern world be like? So, I mean, there's rough areas of, I used to live in Birmingham, there's rough areas of it. It's as rough as it gets. We did a study where we tried to see this, like we tried to prime women to think about, so we had them learn about like, imagine your friend Sarah tells you about an experience with her boyfriend.

1:04:19And in one condition, the boyfriend and her are in a fight and he gets so mad that he punches a wall. And then in the other condition, the boyfriend defends her against this guy coming, trying to rob her. and we thought it was going to make when we primed women to think of like the man is the aggressor punching the wall we thought women were going to dislike the formidable men but they had the same preferences as normal where they were totally fine with the formidable guy but we did find when we primed them with the protector condition they liked all men more so like all men and so but to your point like i think like maybe women aren't aware of those trade-offs totally because Because those two men are likely to be the same person.

1:04:58Yeah. The guy that's really, really competent and prepared to go for it in the protection thing, maybe he's going to punch a wall as well. And they weren't registering it as like, well, maybe I should use cues of formidability as a predictor of like which men would be likely to be violent. And so it was odd that they didn't show that aversion. And so I'm not sure if that link is like as explicit in women's minds. Isn't it strange as well that there's a, especially among young girls, the sort of Gen Z girls, I guess maybe more like Gen Alpha now. If you look at the phrenology of the guys that they're trying to go for, guys are almost signaling like anime character levels of cuteness.

1:05:40The tousley hair, the very sort of thin body. Certainly there's the lux maxing teens that are going in the other direction that are basically trying to speed run manhood. The soft boy. Yeah. Yeah. yeah is that what the the aesthetic is yeah and i think that's because it's less threatening exactly bingo bingo post me too world yeah this guy he couldn't even force himself on me if he wanted like there's no reason he's basically like a cuddly teddy bear best friend that i get to be in a relationship with yeah but when you think about like what is that pushing toward well at some point those women are probably going to diverge away and i think that what jordan peterson used to say about you don't want to dominate your partner so it's not a good long-term strategy to have a partner that you're not that you don't find threatening at all and would never protect you and that you can dominate because you don't want to be in a relationship where you're controlling you see them as a child eventually yeah well this was the uh um who's the uh blonde researcher lady that did the come on face uh katherine samon katherine samon fucking research on the come on face shout out katherine salmon dude she fucking rules but she was talking about how after 50 shades of gray came out and the dark romance genre really started to pick up steam which obviously i contributed to and there was a world where this was politically inconvenient especially for the sort of feminist side of the aisle because all of the guys that were being chosen to be the protagonists were highly dominant highly assertive tall strong masculine millionaire billionaire CEO people.

1:07:13So they tried to put more pliable, they were called golden retriever husbands or cinnamon roll husbands. And they tried to put sort of a more soft, pliable guy on the cover. And also the story throughout, shock, horror, they didn't sell well. And this is short-term mating and fantasy, the same way as what a man watches in porn. The porn that I watch, might be great porn. Or the sex dolls. Might not want to be in a marriage with her, right? Tell me about sex dolls. Your specialist subject. Yeah, I was glad to make the shift from incel researcher now to sex doll researcher so I've got the full gamut.

1:07:52And they actually kind of connect, in a way. They're the main consumer base of sex dolls. So I came across this amazing... That's an unfortunate way to open the sentence. Let me rephrase that. I happened upon this amazing data set that was publicly available that had all the body specifications of sex dolls that are on the market. And this study that was published was very descriptive in nature, and it was just describing the dimensions rather than saying why they might be that way. So I did a kind of my own analysis on it and showed that they reveal all the kind of classically predicted male-mate preferences.

1:08:28And it's interesting because these artificial depictions of female sexual beings are like an undiluted window into men's mate preferences because these dolls they can take on any form they're not limited by nature they're just literally whatever the consumer wants them to be like and there's this it's not just that the creators of sex dolls make them that way and the consumers have no choice there's this co-evolution of the market uh with the consumer and the producer a good example is they wouldn't buy something they didn't want exactly right there's no market for really obese sex doll well there's a smaller market let's say yeah there's a niche for everything yeah but but but the dolls typified all the classic evolutionary predicted mate preferences but except they did so in an extremely super normal stimuli way so have you got images of can we pull this image up i do have an image uh i did i did send through my image here's something that you prepared earlier from your armory of sex dolls it reminds me they're they're these beetles that will try to mate with glass bottles yeah yeah and i always show it to my class and i'm like anyone who watches porn that's also you like it's the same thing i'm easily convinced i'm gonna fucking i'm gonna say it i think that romanticy is for women what porn is for men yeah you know there's a a great video of this dude and the woman's saying um she's comparing disney movies to real life and she's like uh the dad's gone the dad's gone she's alone and the dad's gone and like all of the problems that disney princesses had to go through and the dude does it with like a court of thorns and roses and it's like he's got a big thing he's got a big thing he's got a big thing and something in his eye he's got a big thing and he can fly as well like the there's another one that i saw of a girl talking about what i read in my uh romanticy novel and it's i would wait until the death of a thousand sons just to get to touch your cheek one more time and then it cuts to what she's got in her real life and it's like the trash is smelling again right from a partner um but unrealistic expectations for what are the key triggers for romance and attraction and stuff like that supernormal stimuli is everywhere dude even in romanticity yeah and one of the kind of the white pills on it is that it's still really low status for the guy to be a sex doll haver i mean it's very embarrassing when you start talking about your collection chris it kind of does lower your my collection is just deborah so i just have one and it's deborah so oh my god but yeah but for now it's low status to have sex dolls but maybe that'll change in a way i don't think it's going to change because there's no selection it's the same reason that guys can't flex the amount of only fans that they subscribe to yeah right if you can get something that everybody else has especially in a market where getting something that no one else can get is highly valued it's seen as desperate if i can see you naked for the price of a cheeseburger per month yeah that's not going to be high value it's going to suggest oh i can't get this really so i'm going to have to get it privately but maybe a subset of men will say ah ultimately i don't care about the status now i'll just compete i'll do this will satisfy my sexual urges more and more convincingly when you integrate AI into the system.

1:11:41Maybe they'll just retreat into that world and video games will be their other status game. They will be internet. Male sedation, dude. Male sedation turned up to 11. Jared, I want to see these sex dolls. Where are they? While he's searching for that, I'll tell you an interesting story that I learned when writing this paper is it's actually confusing from one level of analysis why women have smaller feet than men. But it's a sexually selected feature because adult human women are the only species, the only mammal that carries a pregnancy on two feet. And it's really dangerous to have falls that might terminate the pregnancy.

1:12:15So you'd actually expect them from a biomechanical perspective to have evolved really big feet for stability and all that. But they don't. They have really small feet and men have a preference for small feet. And it is a sign of femininity because with each age and pregnancy, women's feet get bigger and bigger. You're fucking kidding me. Yeah, so they have small feet. Okay, so if you're a slightly older woman who's had a ton of kids. Big feet, yeah. The same is true for women's faces. So men's preferences, well actually, like what we view as attractive in a female face is like neotomy. Yes. Looking like a child.

1:12:51And if you amp up those features, they're the same features that make people want to take care of babies, also make women more attractive and people want to help women more. So they're like, just that's selected to be neonous. A quick aside, most people think that they're dehydrated because they don't drink enough water. Turns out water alone isn't just the problem, it's also what's missing from it, which is why for the last five years, I've started every single morning with a cold glass of Element in water. Element is an electrolyte drink with a science-backed ratio of sodium, potassium, and magnesium.

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1:13:50You don't even need to return the box. That's how confident they are that you'll love it. And they offer free shipping in the US. Right now, you can get a free sample pack of Elements' most popular flavors with your first purchase by going to the link in the description below or heading to drinklmnt.com slash modern wisdom. That's drinklmnt.com slash modern wisdom. One other bit from the New Statesman article I thought was really interesting. Women feel much more negatively towards young men than young men feel about them. 50 % of women have a neutral or negative view of men. 72 % of men have a positive view of women.

1:14:25For all of the talk about manosphere-inspired misogyny, three times more women hold a negative view of men than men hold of women. Only 21 % of women have an actively negative view of men, but only 7 % of men feel the same. Men are told that they're the problem, but then you look at the data and young women are significantly more negative toward men than men are toward women. Men get dragged in the media, but are still showing up more optimistically about women than the other way around. But women are fulfilling their part of the bargain. Like if you looked at it from a trade-off perspective, like women are - Here's my beauty.

1:14:58I'm contributing, bringing more to the table financially and everything. The women, if you asked them, I bet they'd say, yeah, well, we're right. They're wrong. Or we're right and they're right. But why would you hold an actively negative view of men? Well, because they see only the risks. They see the - But this is not a view of relationships. This is an actively negative view of men. This seems to be much more judgmental men are bad in and of themselves men are bad over there or they're bad when they're trying to get with me yeah i would think that was something to do with porn because and i also think that explains you know you say that women are attracted to sort of feminine looking anime men i think because maybe they've grown up watching very hyper masculine like porn stars being really rough and violent with women and then they go for the non-threatening mate.

1:15:50And then also they develop this view of men based off maybe the most brutal videos and seeing it from such a young age. But then you develop, you generalize that to all men. I don't understand why you'd be actively negative. 21 % actively negative. I wonder if it's that signal to other women that I'm team women. Although my student, Michaela, she's designing a scale of opposite sex hatred. And what's amazing, speaking of scales, no scale exists to measure sexism in both sexes so you can never no one has ever compared whether men or women are more sexist guess which one is more sexist which one women women hate men more than men hate women totally in line which makes sense from error management perspective as well but yeah yeah i also think something i've noticed is that young women are often again because self-actualization is the ultimate goal they're often deterred from committing and relationships now more so than young men so if young men say that they're going to get engaged young for example other young men are usually happy for them you know like they've got out of the dating game in the dating market if women do it yeah but if women commit early other women express this fear for them like oh you're going to give up some of your potential um and i think that's because we think that women had more to be liberated from and so now if women close down their options we see that as suspect and we worry for them well also it depends if you get danny sulikowski pilled it would be there's an eligible man that's prepared to protect and provide and he's now off the market and it throws into harsh contrast the i mean that was the whole variety piece about uh having a boyfriend is cringe now yeah the girls didn't want to post about their relationship online because it made their single friends feel bad but if their single friends feel bad that presumably is going to show up at some point in the pushback online and they're gonna feel triggered by the fact that fuck like it is tough the dating world is tough especially for young people at the moment especially for young girls at the moment right they're trying to navigate this thing.

1:17:59We talk about the problems of the dating environment for men and thereby kind of miss the problems that women are facing in the dating market, including ones that are not self-imposed, but they're at least like intrinsic, either their uncertainty, their fear, their social anxiety, the worries about letting go of their freedom and their independence. These are real things. Whether they're manipulated or manufactured by a modern environment, there's still things that you have to navigate and that fucking sucks for women. And I think the forensic kind of stalking that groups of women do on a potential new mate.

1:18:33I mean, even my girlfriend, she tells me about the deep dive she did on my years old tweets. Lucky to come out of it alive, really. Glad that she didn't go on your blue sky. I know, yeah, no one does. You're so bitter about blue sky. No engagement apart from people that hate you, dude. Get off that. Self-harm. Torture porn. But no, they really do this kind of collective condemnation, deep dive. And everyone is a little bit cringe in some way. And you can find how they're cringe. So in some level, you have to almost accept that your new boyfriend is a little bit cringe. And that's what I told my girlfriend.

1:19:11We're very happy together. Embrace the cringe. Yeah. Tanya, what do you reckon about icks? Have you done any research on icks and stuff like that? No, but there does, like anecdotally, there seems to be a sex difference where like women get the ick and then men do not. Yeah, I wonder if it's like a absence of a sufficient, like you need some threshold of masculinity. And if you don't cross it, then, or if you indicate anything that violates it. I don't know, Frey, you'd probably know what's the stronger predictor. Well, I'm not obviously an evolutionary psychologist, but I see it from a cultural perspective that you have so many messages coming at young women to be on guard, constantly on guard, like looking for problems.

1:19:51And so you have a feminist message that, you know, you have to be independent. You can't let a man get in the way of your goals. But then you also have a therapeutic message, which is like, be on guard for any red flags, any signs that someone is not good enough or you're incompatible. and so I think young women might feel something like an ick and then they're encouraged especially by social media to take that feeling really seriously which is like if you feel some negative emotion toward your partner you're incompatible or there's something wrong and so I think we're just way more we're bracing all the time to see the red flags and it also kind of announces like you said kind of allegiance to the sisterhood alliance but also elevates their own mate value it's like oh there's just a total scarcity of guys.

1:20:34My standards are so high. Things are so difficult. I have a refined palate. I couldn't eat. I wouldn't be able to eat at fucking IHOP this evening. I always feel like that about men who say they have types. I'm like, I just don't buy it. Like, I only like plants. Dude, this was the, you know, of all of the things that I went through on Love Island, this was one of the weirdest ones, which is that you turn up, and one of the first questions that the press during your lockdown week, and you're doing interviews, and all of the interviews for the show, one of the first things is what's your type yeah what is he looking for what's your but not what are you looking for it's who are you looking for and maybe that would have changed 10 years ago when i was on in fact it was more than 10 years ago when i was on love island now right what's your type what do you mean like who is like oh yeah it's um it's a ginger girls with a blue they have to have blue eyes they can't be too blue but like if they're a little i'm like who the fuck has these weird autistic preferences for a partner because they're only talking about physically yeah they're never saying oh i want someone i want someone who is really in touch with their emotions i want someone who is they wouldn't have even said i want someone who has these interests like physically what are you looking for i think it's just a way from for in guys anyway i think it's a way of just posturing like oh i can be so specific and narrow my choice parameters so much because i have so many options yeah and i've been always a little bit susa, but I've never bought it.

1:21:57Yeah. Some of the new polling done at the New Statesman suggests that privileged women are the most pessimistic of all. Women in middle-class professions are less likely to say they feel valued by society and less likely to believe that if they work hard, they will succeed in life when compared to their working-class counterparts. Young men are now more likely to be unemployed than young women, yet young women are far more financially cynical. 21 points less likely than young men to believe they will ever out-earn their parents, white women are more likely to feel the country is racist than their non-white women middle-class partners.

1:22:31You white women are awful. Yeah. I wonder how much of that is like related to that finding where the only way that women could be agentic was like on behalf of someone else. So like the more successful that you are or the more that you have going in your favor the only like way that you can be agentic is to like be so deeply caring um there are some ethnographies on adolescent girls and the only ones that were allowed to be popular were if they were super super nice and so they had to like kind of over deliver on like kindness in order to be allowed to be popular and so it feels a little bit like that same pattern that like perhaps women do this so the the envy or resentment of other women won't bring them down um joyce benenson has this um hero friend of the show oh she's the best i'm obsessed with her um she has this paper on leveling showing that like women are more likely to use a leveling strategy where they say like oh we should all be equal when someone is surpassing them and so i wonder if like once you have all of these things operating in your favor you kind of have to be like a martyr in order to like continue on.

1:23:44Otherwise people might not like you. Where do you get your victimhood points from? I won't say who said it in our group chat, but someone replied to Rob Henderson bringing this up and said, middle-class hay fever, Rob. When there's no high load of parasites, people's immune system gets bored and starts looking for things to react to and you get allergies to dust and pollen. When the middle class has no threats, their threat system gets bored and starts looking for trivial things to blow out of proportion. White privilege, gender identity, ultra processed foods. It's all pollen. You don't have oat milk.

1:24:13You're traumatizing me. No explicit segregation and blatant racism. Sensitivity to microaggressions increases. That's what I was going to say is I think it's more time to introspect and ruminate because you have girls and young women not just picking up on ics in their partner and like scrutinizing them and looking for flaws, but then doing that to themselves. So constantly pathologizing, diagnosing themselves, wondering what's wrong with them, over analyzing their personality traits. And so I do think it's just more time and less bigger problems like say having children where you put your neuroticism you funnel it into something productive and instead it then turns inwards or also against your partner but there is status afforded to women doing that in that ecosystem in that social system of higher education where women are dominating now they're rewarded for espousing views like that so you know they're showing that they know the ideology of the leading status people in their world this is me showing fealty to the cause i understand this thing yeah what's the data around men and women being demonized and seen as victims so we have some studies showing that like we have this like kind of cognitive heuristic of victim and perpetrator and when men and women are like involved in any instance of harm, we're more likely to see women in the victim role and men in the perpetrator role, be more likely to blame men and more likely to have sympathy for women.

1:25:42And so it would suggest like perhaps some of the reason we don't see a lot of sympathy for men is it's like cognitively harder to see them as victims. And then for women, it's just cognitively easier to see them as victims. And so we feel that sympathy, but it kind of sucks for both sexes. So in the domain of harm, men are disadvantaged and they're not seen as victims. But for women in other domains where you'd want to be the agentic person, like if you're deciding on a CEO or a president, women aren't seen as agentic and as capable. So it's not like one sex is clearly doing better than the other.

1:26:22They're both facing these like - One doesn't get sympathy and one doesn't get belief. Yeah. I guess that's one of the challenges I think that women face when they go into the workplace that they feel like if they need to be assertive and dominant, they have to temper the throttle a bit a little bit for fear of being bitchy. They don't want to be a bitch, right? Or a diva. Yeah. I feel like there's like an agency warmth continuum and women are expected to be here. And if they go farther along agency, they're seen as low in warmth, bitchy. But the same is true for men. They're higher on the agency side.

1:26:52And so if they show warmth by crying, they're not seen as competent. So we're both encouraged to stay in our lanes. But if women show too much warmth, they're seen as pliable and not competent, because it's seen that people that are a little bit more brusque are seen as higher competence, right? Warmth is negatively associated with competence, I think. And I just think this kind of protectiveness that we have about women, it just gets repackaged as oppression in a way. And I get that you could be paternalistic and overly, and a lot of kind of, you know, abuse of women does occur under the guise of for their own good and protection.

1:27:29But it is astounding the extent to which we are more protective of women than men. You have to really contort yourself into a lot of knots to see the women a wonderful effect and think of it as oppression toward women. Do you know much of the stats around the women a wonderful effect, like all of the different ways that people prefer women to men? I know one study that looked at this kind of where they looked at job hiring discrimination, and it's gone down against women, but people overestimate its presence. And so they assume it's still there, even though the data suggests clearly it's not. So it's like, we're almost like just sensitized to detect it, even if it's not there.

1:28:12And even when you learn about some discrepancy, if it's against women, people are up in arms about it. But if it's against men, it's like, no biggie. Is attractiveness under-acknowledged as a kind of privilege? Oh, I think so, yeah. So on both ends of the spectrum, so the pretty privilege, which also has its costs. There's costs associated with being seen as pretty. Other women in particular see you as more promiscuous and things like that. But there are enormous benefits across the board to being attractive, male or female. But then at the other side of the spectrum, there's enormous cost to being unattractive.

1:28:45And there is new research that shows that we're not readily able to recognize this form of privilege. We acknowledge other forms of privilege, but attractiveness, we're reluctant to acknowledge that it even exists. And we also have evidence that women are far more attractive than men. It's not just one OKCupid study. Loads of data unpublished from our lab finds this attractiveness discrepancy. There's tons of data. Women are just more attractive. So arguably, a feminine advantage in the domain of attractiveness, when that can be translated into so many resources, there are studies to show that beauty is status for women.

1:29:23Women defer to more beautiful women in the way that men defer to more formidable men. So this is an advantage. And it could be another thing that's actually a less acknowledged point about what's putting women off having children is that they hear these horror stories. They hit their beauty. They literally have to take a massive beauty hit. And that's just, there's no way around that. It's less than they've ever had to take, but it's still there. It's so funny that having kids would impact your beauty, but the effect of pretty privilege is denied and hidden. Yeah. It's like, well, if that is playing into it, you have to admit the fact that it's there.

1:30:00Yeah, I don't think people would acknowledge at face value that's one of the reasons. Well, you do see them sometimes women are like, I'm not sacrificing my body for that. And, you know, we have new data come out that shows that relationships having being a parent, similar levels of happiness to not being a parent, greater levels of meaning for the parents, especially for women, but lower relationship satisfaction for the parents. So it does take a toll on the relationship, but certainly on the woman's mate value thereafter, having the kids, the toll it takes on her beauty. So you can kind of see why women, if there's all these benefits, they can translate their beauty, which is their status, into, they'd be reluctant to sacrifice all that.

1:30:43Yeah, I mean, this is kind of what we were talking about before, which is that I think social media platforms have incentivized women to see themselves less as human and more as products. And so their life becomes about marketing themselves and optimizing themselves. And so I think, yeah, having a child disrupts being the perfect pristine product. But then we're in this really weird scenario where don't you want to look good in order to reproduce and have children at base level? But now Instagram comes along and Instagram gives women so much dopamine and status that then that becomes a higher priority.

1:31:19Yeah, because it's a misconception about evolutionary psychology that we have these fitness optimizing mechanisms. We actually have, we're adaptation executioners. So it's not like, it's just that behaviors that over evolutionary time would have resulted in more offspring are passed on. So women still have the desire to have sex for the most part. people don't come into the world with, oh, I really want to increase my reproductive success. I want to have offspring, but they do want to be seen as a high mate value to others, have sexual urges. And over time, those things would have resulted in reproductive success.

1:31:55So now it's a bit of a mismatch. Joyce Benenson, she has this cross-cultural study where she shows among young people, one of their primary goals is finding a romantic partner, but one of their lowest goals is having kids and so she makes this argument that like we probably evolved a desire to attract a mate but we didn't need to evolve the desire to have kids because so long as you were having sex you were having kids you didn't have reliable contraception yeah yeah it's a hugely evolutionary novel technology that's really just thrown the whole thing up in the air i think also in young women sometimes the relationship becomes an accessory to display online what was your line about that in the episode that we did a couple years ago it was uh relationships are just brand partnerships now yeah yeah yeah it's it's something to display and so the characteristics that maybe you would select for before social media are very different now it's presenting it to other women and how other women will react seeing your yeah your launch of a partner online yeah the soft launch yeah they're not about this though uh 60 of romantic relationships begin as friendships just making the world harder to date in?

1:33:05Well, given that there's fewer and fewer cross-sex friendships, I think it should be celebrated that this is an avenue towards relationship formation. And, you know, the age-old question of can men and women ever just be friends? We've just got a new paper accepted that shows that we call it courtship and cross-sex friendship where men provision financially to their cross-sex friendships that they're interested in mating with. 50 % of people say they have romantic interest in a cross-sex friend. The same number have had sex with at least one, particularly young people. So I do think it's a good pathway to relationships, and if you formed more cross-sex friendships, it would be a direct route to relationships, because attraction grows over time, you get proximity breeds intimacy, but also you get to display a lot of the same qualities that make for a good mate make for a good friend too.

1:34:02And men and women select friends who have the same qualities that they want in a mate. So protection, physical attractiveness, resources. So it's a good pathway. But the secondary route is it broadens your networks. And it also helps you learn about cross-sex mind reading. So it's very hard to actually, you know, come to the boneheaded beliefs of some of the red pill, black pill world online, if you actually have in real life female friends that you know kind of disprove a lot of what you hear. I'm going to quote you back to you here. William Costello polled 527 heterosexual and bisexual people.

1:34:38Are opposite sex friendships ever truly platonic? 81 % of women said yes. Only 58 % of men said yes. Women were three times more likely than men to say their friendship was purely platonic. So I think it's a little, women hear that and they sometimes get very upset to learn that their male friends see them as... That nearly half of your guy friends are trying to sleep with you. Well, not necessarily. It's just that they kind of would. So, and this is kind of the misconception that women maybe hear that and they think, oh, so he only wants to sleep with me. And it's not quite the case. It's just that he probably would.

1:35:13When people hear about this for the first time and they doubt it, I always say, just try it. Just try when you're out for a few drinks the next time. Do you remember that one in The Economist? A study of Americans finds that in platonic couples, men are far more likely than the woman to find their friend sexy and far more likely to think that she finds them attractive too. Indeed, a man's assessment of how much his female friend fancies him matches how much he fancies her and is entirely unrelated to how she really feels. Clearly, men are prone to wishful thinking. Yeah, well, men need to kind of pluck up the courage some way.

1:35:45Everyone wants to be asked out more. That was your thing. That's true also. So, you know, on the one hand, women want to be approached more, but then are kind of unhappy to learn that their opposite-sex friends are interested in them. But I do think women keep some opposite-sex friends as backup mates too. Oh, you've got loads of data around backup mates. Come on. But yeah, I just think ultimately we should celebrate and try and cultivate more opposite-sex friendships because it could be a pathway to proper reach. I wonder if on social media that disincentivizes opposite sex friendships because you live in different worlds completely.

1:36:21So we were talking earlier and you hadn't heard of influences that like shaped my childhood. How did I not know Moella? Zoella. Whatever. Do you know Zoella? I've heard of Moella. There we go. Sorry, you're an avid subscriber of Zoella. Getting with the program. Did you get ready for today with Zoella? No, I didn't. A new try on haul from Gymshaw? I know that thing. What happens there? But it's like Zoella, but also Facetune. Facetune is a huge app among young women where they can edit themselves. I hadn't heard of it like that. So I think one of the statistics in my book is like 70 or 80 % of young women wouldn't post on Instagram without Facetuning themselves first.

1:36:57It makes me so relieved to hear this. Every photo should have that. Yeah, yeah. Attached to it. But it's been downloaded like hundreds of millions of times. It's a core memory from my childhood. but then so i write this whole book about social media and the experience for young women but then for young men they have a completely different childhood so it can be a young man that grew up runescape playing runescape you played runescape you said that you're a bit more of a i'm a bit more masculine yeah yeah but yeah they will not even recognize things that were huge influences on young women and so i wonder if we try and be friends with the opposite sex it's like a whole different world because algorithms are suggesting you already didn't have that much in common and now you've got even less interesting yeah that's a good idea what else are you brandishing some graph i can see that you've got on your phone there what did you find that sex doll yet i have a question about the opposite sex friends is there a sex difference in the degree to which our opposite sex friends match our mate preferences because if there's not if both men and women are like designing their opposite or selecting opposite sex friends based on their mate preferences then when women say oh i'm not attracted to my opposite sex friends is that true i've seen data around this i've seen data that shows that the same traits that you look for in a partner are the ones that you look for in your opposite sex friends i've seen this yeah so if men and women do that to the same degree then is that really the case when women are saying they can't be so shocked yeah like what are the odds that the tall handsome guy that looks exactly the same as my actual boyfriend thought that oops yeah but but it's kind of like from a jealousy perspective you know you can see why it would be really jealousy inducing for a man for his mate to have opposite sex friends or work colleagues who are sharing you know a mission together like you hear of these things of women calling someone their work husband i'm like disaster That's no tactic.

1:38:58Don't ever say this. This is a bad idea. So I do think that men are inclined to kind of pump the brakes on women's careers for a mate guarding perspective. You know, that's kind of and an opposite sex friendship perspective as well. One more thing on the looks maxing, Chris, is I thought it was interesting that. Did you see the Australian guy you interviewed, Clavicular? Yeah, I was going to say he's more effortlessly good looking. I think that's true that for men to be handsome, it needs to be like they didn't try. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Now, I've done a little bit of a deep dive into that guy's Instagram.

1:39:33He certainly tries and he certainly knows he's a handsome guy and whatever. But he's definitely pulling off that effortlessness much more. But it's interesting that the commentary around him being, Clavicular being mobbed by this more handsome Australian interviewer, it's kind of proving Clavicular's philosophy exactly correct. He's like, you're saying that he's more handsome, so he mugs me. That's my whole philosophy. I'm exactly right. It's all about looks. Why do you spend time with people like that? All right, have a nice day. Are you trying to, I see you want to make this political. Too bad I didn't have time to look into, you know, anything about potentially, you know, who your wife cheated with.

1:40:21but don't try to go down that line of questioning with me. All right. Because I'm not doing any political. I'm not married. Yes, I mean, but I'm sorry. I was simply out of the ass because obviously. Maybe you got a looks max then. So I could teach you about looks max and then maybe you could switch that up. But thanks for the time. Appreciate the interview. All right. I mean, look, they did light them quite nicely, which was good. It was definitely quite a sultry. If that turned into gay porn, I wouldn't have been surprised. But yeah, he proves his whole thesis right for people's reaction to be like, he's the more handsome one.

1:40:57It's like, yeah, you're lionizing looks. I thought we weren't judging people based on looks. I thought that looks maxing was stupid and it didn't really matter. Exactly right. But isn't he more handsome because his demeanor, he's playful and he's smirking. I feel like Clavicular just looks so tense and erotic almost. Called autism. Yeah. I think Clavicular does those things on purpose, like stages the walkout for attention. Yeah, yeah, of course he does. But yeah, that effortlessness, I do think, is more attractive to women. Well, the same thing is true to men as well. Think about the difference between Sidney Sweeney and Sabrina Carpenter.

1:41:30Sabrina Carpenter is a female designed for the female gaze. And Sidney Sweeney is a female designed for the male gaze. Our gay male gaze. Yes, correct. Bingo. And yeah, why is it that men love Sidney Sweeney and hate Sabrina Carpenter? And why is it that women love Sabrina Carpenter and hate Sidney Sweeney? there is research to show women hate women with big breasts as well they're really well if you see very small very dull very big eyes very like you know small body big head like meotness meotness Sabrina does exactly what you've described Tanya though the for the girls whereas you know Sydney Sweeney is very much for the guys even says it in her Instagram posts and things so yeah I feel like women's fashion is like that where it's like it's almost like you can tell immediately who someone is signaling to because women's will be like the baggiest thing you could possibly find and that's the trendy look and it's like no not revealing their body at all i'm sure men hate it yeah alex cooper on call the daddy they're always in big hoodies they're always sort of quite slouchy very cozy i do think the pick me insult is really sort of drilled into women of my generation where it's like it's not even if you're saying something that men would approve of or looking away that men would approve of but anything like masculine coded like even me just saying i'm interested in masculine podcasts rather than feminine podcasts that's like a pick me statement and so i feel like it changes not only how when women present themselves but their mannerisms and their actual temperament and personality becomes uh shaped towards what women expect of them because they don't want to be a pick me yeah it's such a clever form of intersexual competition to be like don't be seen to be trying to appeal to men that's like a cuck like men are doing it too simp shaming yeah yeah yeah and simp shame yeah anyone who appeals too directly that's cheating yeah the game theory of slut shaming fucking blows my mind i learned this in mate by jeffrey and tucker and uh basically what slut shaming does is it's a price enforcement mechanism to ensure that the price of sex doesn't drop below lower level that most women would be happy with.

1:43:42So if William's prepared to give out blowjobs on the second date, but I want to wait until the fifth date, I have to lower my price. I know, I'm sorry. And that means that I need to lower my price. So it's in my interests to raise that up, especially given that I would be able to undercut it. If I make everybody else wait longer to put out and then I can come in as like the bargain discount, that seems like a good deal. But what is it that's happening? It's women giving away what is seen by other women as one of their most valuable resources for negotiating with men, sex, giving it away too freely.

1:44:18So I started thinking about, okay, what's the equivalent for men? What do men give away? And I think it's resources. so if women are prepared to give away sex without commitment and that gets castigated by other women men who are prepared to give away resources without sex get castigated by other men that's why men don't like only fans women because they are extracting from the male dating pool the thing that if they weren't able to do it through only fans they might have to go on a date maybe with me yeah and that would mean that i would be in with a shot this is why i get attacked both ways because I'll get called an internal misogynist and then men will come to my defense and then they'll get called simps.

1:44:58You're an airman simp. Exactly right. That's both things in action. Yeah, 100%. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Guys, I fucking love you all. You're all brilliant. Wes, what have you got coming out? You've got a book? Yes, just a book called Girls and my sub stack, freyaindia.co.uk. Tanya, what have you got to push? Anything? A new paper called The Greater Female Vulnerability Hypothesis. It's still getting published, so not yet out. Okay. my blue sky just follow me on x you'll see lots of fire poles and some exciting stuff coming out follow me on google scholar to see the academic stuff unreal guys i appreciate you all we've christened uh evolutionary psychology roundtable uh getting in loads of trouble in the new studio i appreciate you all all right goodbye everybody this was fun yeah awesome thank you very much for tuning in if you enjoyed that episode.

1:45:49Another one that I know you'll love. It's just here.

1:46:17about why I like it and there's links to go and buy it and it's completely free. You can get it right now by going to chriswillx.com slash books. That's chriswillx.com slash books.